Ask HN: How do you advertise without spending money?

Organic search engine optimization. I could talk about this topic every day and not get tired. My two best tips are that 1) create a way such that linking to your site solves a problem for someone else and 2) do #1 in a scalable fashion. If you can do that, organic search is like a free money buffet.

Failing that utopian outcome, at the very least you can create things on your website which solve problems for the type of people who give links. For example, I'm a Rails developer. Among other talents, I can write code. Being able to write code means I'm able to write OSS projects of use to other businesses which use Rails. I host them on my site, and when other developers write blog posts taking credit to their friends and bosses for solving the problems that I actually solved for them (grins), I generally get a backlink.

OSS is by no means the only thing you can do. Good tutorials, evergreen resources (things which will never go out of style in your field), authoritative statistics, high-quality visualizations of data, etc etc, all attract links. Again, try to do them at scale.

twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services

Do you find that that actually gets results? I am kind of outside the Valley, physically and spiritually speaking, and I just can't imagine a business spending time on Facebook or Flickr and that benefiting them more than spending the time on their own website.

SEO getting you a little money to reinvest into AdWords or similar paid acquisition strategies is a nice feedback loop if you can get it, too.

I share my excitement about what I'm working on with my close group of friends. I give them free gear (shirts) when possible, behind the scenes access as in stories about what I'm doing and seeing what I need to do. I ask them for favors and get them involved. They get as excited as I am and there you have the beginnings of word of mouth.

I don't actually do these myself, but if I was a developer I'd do these:

1) start blogging about things in your niche.

That way you'll get a number of people in your niche coming to your site every day and seeing a link to your product.

2) There are a ton of free/bonus advertising coupons, $100 at Adwords, $100 on Facebook, $50 on Myspace, $100 bonus when you spend $30 on Yahoo. etc etc

Focus on long tail keywords in your niche, and you'll be paying 5 cents a click, which will go a long way.

3) Since you are a developer create a few templates for all those blogging services. Wordpress, Tumblr etc. Throw a link in the footer "Web Design by YOUR COMPANY" and eventually you'll have a thousand blogs a) linking to your site and b) showing off your work to thousands of people

4) Volunteer to do design for a few rising stars. i.e. from what I understand Pallian did the early Mixergy's design for free to get his name out there.

5) create a bunch of long tail websites, and advertise your services through those.

6) Print a bunch of business cards go to your local town center, and offer to build sites for all of those small businesses. Charge one amount for a template, and a much higher amount for a custom job.

7) Get on those freelancer sites, and start bidding on projects.

It helps if you can donate some of your time to an open source project that's complementary or related to what your company does.

For example, I volunteered to write the tutorial for Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/wiki/BasicTutorial) because it's a great alternative to the closed, expensive InDesign product (http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/).

Tutorials or presentations are also good.

I created a basic overview of how to create an e-book, and presented it at BarCamp5 in NYC.

After the conference, I posted the slides and links on my personal site (http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=286).

As a result of both activities, my company's site (http://www.fifobooks.com) gets traffic and business (new registered authors and readers, as well as other opportunities I hadn't expected).

Not sure if it applies to all startups but writing case studies or producing info-graphics are great ways to attract attention. http://www.flowtown.com/blog/ are doing great job at the latter and we (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php) try to do a good job at the former

I do alot of the stuff like you mentioned but I have a slightly more nefarious method that I've been thinking about trying.

There are alot of 'coupons' for Google AdWords. If you sign up for HostGator's $5/month plan, for example, you get a $50 or $100 (I forget which) voucher. If you buy the Google Analytics book (well worth the investment), you get a credit. There are lots of websites and services online. You could theoretically string these together to create a number of free advertising campaigns.

Of course, the catch is that you have to create a new AdWords account each time (most of the coupons are only for 'new' customers).

SEO is the biggest thing its keeps driving traffic and should keep getting bigger as time goes on.

Blogging works to get you some visitors, as long as you write something people want to read.

Contact bloggers, and local newspapers to write a review about your product or site.

Post on related forums with a link in your signature

Not free but cheap:

Print out some flyers and post them around town (if going for a local market)

Create t-shirts and wear them and give them to people to wear.

I would figure out if there is a way to create incentives for your existing customers to spread the word. If they derive a benefit from talking about your site/product, both they and you benefit from more eyeballs.